I’ve been working on a new EP over the past few months. It’s titled Lipstick Funeral.
"The abyss is within and without. If it doesn’t claim your inner world, it claims you from the outer."
The production is larger this time, more controlled aggression, but still grounded in the same space. Coldwave, darkwave, post-punk. Early analogue synths and drum machines shape everything here. Minimal, repetitive, restrained.
“Doomsday. Doomsday” opens the record. There’s a tension running through it, a sense that something is ending, even if it isn’t fully visible yet. I found myself thinking back to Bob Dylan's 1963, Masters of War, which I first heard as a teenager. It carried a weight that stayed with me. That feeling returns here in a different form. “say you love me one last time” sits inside that space - not as a conclusion, but as something already slipping away.
“I Was an Alien” follows. It can be heard in different ways - arrival, escape, displacement - but it stayed close to a more human feeling while I was writing it. The sense of being somewhere that doesn’t want you. The language is direct, almost stripped back, as if anything more would weaken it.
“Welcome to The Birthday Party” moves into a more enclosed space. Things happen, but they don’t connect. There’s a disorientation to it. I was again drawn toward another Dylan song, Ballad of a Thin Man (1965), not necessarily in a literal sense, but in that feeling of observing something you can’t quite grasp. This version revisits an earlier Alien Skin recording from The Unquiet Grave (2010). It’s stayed with me for a long time, and it felt right to bring it into this context.
“A Pretty Corpse, A Scaffold of Life” came from a series of images rather than a clear idea. Something about the closeness of beauty and collapse. The way loss doesn’t arrive cleanly — it spreads, it lingers. There’s no distance from it.
“Lipstick Funeral” closes the main sequence. It reduces everything down to a single image and holds it there. Nothing resolves. It just remains.
“Lipstick Funeral (Demo)” is taken from the original writing session. It’s less refined, but closer to the initial atmosphere - before anything was shaped or controlled. Included as a Bandcamp-only bonus for those who want to hear where it began.
Available at Bandcamp
~George